Named one of the best reading series in NYC by Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series returns on Wednesday, September 23, at 7 PM via Zoom, featuring poets Leila Chatti, Dell Lemmon and Vievee Francis. Free and open to the public, each reading in the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series features three poets, with at least one from Brooklyn and one from outside the borough, pairing emerging with more established poets and focusing on those from underrepresented communities. Readings are curated and emceed by Brooklyn Poets Executive Director Jason Koo.

To register for the event, please click the green "Register" button: you can choose either a free ticket or a donation ticket (suggested donation: $5–10). Donations will help us support three organizations doing vital work right now chosen by the three poets: American Red Cross's Wildfire Relief (Leila Chatti), Food Bank NYC (Dell Lemmon) and YesYes Books (Vievee Francis). Brooklyn Poets will match the first $250 in donations and all donations will be split evenly among the three orgs.

About our featured poets:

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Provost Fellow. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House American Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Dell Lemmon is the author of two books, both published by Box Turtle Press: Are You Somebody I Should Know?, forthcoming this fall, and Single Woman (2016). Her poems have appeared in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Court Green, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Mudfish, WSQ and Washington Square Review, among other publications. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart and several times recognized as a finalist for various poetry contests. She holds a BFA in acting and an MA and PhD in performance studies. She lives in Brooklyn and sometimes on Cape Cod, too.

Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection) and Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2016, winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

Live closed captioning will be available during the event, and texts of the poets' poems will be screen-shared during their readings. To request additional accommodations or more information, please contact Jason Koo at koo@brooklynpoets.org.

Note that by attending our events, you agree to the terms of our code of conduct. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of this code. Thank you for respecting our community.